-Film inspired by Beatles Tunes starts strong, gets all helter skelter (like I could avoid using a beatles pun!)...
Review by Charles Elmore
I once heard a theory from an old musician friend who told me that between The Beatles, Prince and Nirvana there were no new chord progressions on the guitar. Whether this is true or not isn't the issue, this is after all a film review blog and not a music critique blog. I bring it up to point out that even to this day, the influence of the Fab Four still courses through our pop culture and their latest impact can be felt in Julie Taymor's new film Across The Universe.
Across the Universe is the tale of six people whose lives intersect and collide in 60's New York City, as told through the music of The Beatles. As most people know, the early sixties in America was quite a tumultuous time, a tremendous social, political and even musical growth and this is the era viewed from our characters, growing pains and all. The film starts out with our two main characters, Jim Stugess plays Jude, a Liverpool youth and we first see him dancing with his girlfriend in a basement bar where a pre-invasion style "beatles" type band performs onstage. Intercut is Lucy, the wide-eyed American teen, played by Evan Rachel Wood. She shares a experience parallel to Jude's at her High School dance where her and her boyfriend share a sincere moment before he volunteers to go to Vietnam. The scene is interesting in its depiction of two different cultures, the gritty, working class side of Britain's youth and the clean and innocent Americana of the late 50's/early 60's, a clean veneer just moments away from cracking.
Across the Universe doesn't veer too far from the standard story type a film about the turbulent 60's would follow. You can almost predict the direction the film is heading. There's the privileged, collegiate siblings that break from the norm to rush to the Village in New York, spurning their parents wishes to "make something of themselves", the Midwestern teen who feels out of place, both emotionally and physically and the eager british youth, trying to find the GI father who abandoned his mother post-WWII to start one stateside. And Julie Taymor does a great job initially at telling these interweaving stories.
This film will quickly be classified as a musical, although it lacks certain musical tropes. It's more akin to Baz Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge than Bill Condon's Dreamgirls. Across The Universe's use of musical performances comes naturally out of the day to day lives of Jude, Lucy, Pruedence, et.al than say randomly spinning on a mountain singing the hills are alive with the sound of music.
Like anyone who has a deep fondness for music (and Beatles tunes specifically), we can all relate to those moments where we randomly burst into song. Whether in the grocery store and you begin to hum along to the muzak version of Strawberry Fields or with your friends driving around late at night and you burst out in chorus during the break of All You Need Is Love. We've all been there and the musical sing-a-longs come across in similar fashion, more like background music than Busby Berkley set pieces.
The film makes a valiant effort in covering all the bases of the era it is set within, including the Detroit race riots, the protest marches on Washington but where it skews from the cliche is in its choice to show the 60's counter-culture growth in New York's West Village instead of they stereotypical Haight-Ashbury approach to the 60's peace, love and hippiness movement so often associated with the times.
Unfortunately the film loses its focus midway through when the group meet up with a timothy leary type named (get ready for it) Dr. Robert played by a certain humanitarian rock star, with tongue firmly in cheek. This part of the film is obviously set up to introduce the LSD era of the 60's and the turn on, tune out ethos of the decades midpoint but it soon goes crashing horribly down into a random and completely unnecessary performance of For The Benefit of Mr. Kite, with comedian Eddie Izzard as the titular character. At this point, and maybe it's due to a little "sugar cubed" dropping from the director herself, the film just loses any traction it set up, derailing the film. It's an unfortunate scene that probably could've been excised and wouldn't even have been missed.
It takes the film and our characters quite awhile before they get back on course and we have to see these six suffer a little more before they're brought back together, slightly more world weary. And just like in the documentary Let it Be, when the beatles played their last performance atop their recording studio, our characters are brought back together in the end, after their long, hard journey through the sixties, to sing one more song on the roof of , All You Need Is Love.
The music of the Beatles isn't, by any means, the absolute representation of the movements and era of the 60's. Especially since the band didn't even last the whole decade. But with Across the Universe, their music is used as a device to place a magnifying glass over the issues in our society and world that still plague us to this day, issues of race, war and class. Same old story, same old tunes. But just like the timeless standards written by four boys from Liverpool, the issues never grow old.
Surprisingly, I enjoyed hearing each song, reconpeptualized and interpreted more-so than the film itself. Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Fan's of the Beatles music will enjoy catching several Beatles-centric references throughout the film as well as a few surprising cameos from big name stars. From the names of characters to the use of song lyrics as dialog, some will make you smile, while others, may in fact make your eyes roll.
Enjoy
Chaz